The 2026 local government election count put service delivery, or the failure of it, at the centre of South African politics. When the IEC’s leaderboard at the Results Operation Centre showed the Democratic Alliance leading in three Gauteng cities, with the City of Johannesburg contested by Helen Zille, the reaction was framed as a racial alarm. But the numbers on the screen were less about the colour of a mayor and more about what residents were saying about the services they had endured for three decades.
That reading is no coincidence. The well-documented problems of poor service delivery, corruption, incompetence and nepotism angered the masses into voting differently. Yet there is more beneath the tally. The rejection of failing services, the power of the poor, and a quiet, long-building belief in a white man’s competence all converged on that leaderboard.
The belief did not appear overnight. It began roughly 30 years ago, when black leaders remained silent, comfortable spectators as scholar transport ferried black schoolchildren from townships and villages to white schools in towns. Black parents spent hard-earned salaries entrusting a white man with their children’s future while black leadership presided over the education system. Given the history of the 1976 Soweto uprising, the normalisation of a white man’s education, with pride, is difficult to accept. The message it sent was blunt: competency looks white. A quarter of a century later, it is illogical that a parent who trusts a white man with a child’s schooling should not trust a white party with the country, after being failed by their own black leaders. The same leaders have themselves joined the queue, entrusting their own children to white educators.
Meanwhile, the land question exposes the same gap between political office and actual delivery. For years the needle has moved slowly, and the majority of indigenous people still wait for the return of their ancestral land while leaders remain silent about land held in white hands. They have shown more discomfort with a white leader presiding over a city voted for by black people than with the persistence of apartheid-era patterns in land ownership. Land is South Africa’s primary productive asset; without access to it, the demographic dividend becomes a liability marked by unemployment, poverty and inequality. If leaders had serious objections to apartheid’s practices, land reform would have been their first priority, because that is where apartheid is still fully practised under a democratic dispensation. Across the Limpopo River, undisputed reports indicate the Mnangagwa regime is compensating former white farmers who will return to run the agricultural sector. South Africa’s leaders, sharing a deep history of land dispossession with Zimbabwe, are nowhere to be seen on the same terrain.
The economy tells a parallel story of unmet implementation. It is reported that the top 10% of the white population owns over 85% of household wealth. For more than 30 years, the democratic government failed to produce stable black job creators able to hire the millions of black unemployed. Thirty-two years is enough time to transform the economy so black people become employers of choice. Instead, beneficiaries of tenders have made black livelihoods worse, and millions still look to be employed by a white man who has the economic means and resources their leaders are careless about. That is total reliance, and the economy should by now be half in black hands.
The pattern extends into party politics itself. Black leaders have split black votes by forming many parties, funded by white money, while criticising those funders during campaigns. Perhaps it is not a bad idea that some voters decided to give power to the source of the funding. In some rural areas, parties like FF Plus are making serious inroads with a few black candidates, something unthinkable a short while ago.
What the ROC results actually measured was the obsession with political office at the expense of liberation objectives. Neglect of education, economic transformation and land reform will render any black-representing party irrelevant. If the current pace holds, blacks should start preparing for the return of a white president in the Union Building sooner than expected.
Simion Mashego is an independent researcher and land reform expert. The views reflected in this story are his own and do not reflect the views of the Mail & Guardian.